The
author of the poetry collections misled
(Calgary AB: Red Deer, 1999) and Joy Is So Exhausting (Toronto ON: Coach
House Books, 2009), as well as the chapbook Good Egg Bad Seed (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2004), Windsor, Ontario poet, editor and critic Susan Holbrook’s latest poetry collection is Throaty Wipes (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2016), composed of
(as the press release tells us) “her signature fusion of formal innovation and
lyricism […]” The poems in Throaty Wipes
are composed as a mix of lyric, prose and visuals, as Holbrook explores
movement, language, sound and lyric. Structurally, her poems explore different
ways of seeing, shaping and sounding, experimenting wildly between and amid
forms to show numerous possibilities between “how poetry works” and “how prose
works,” or, more specifically, utilizing language poetry to explore the gradient
between the lyric, the fragment, and the sentence (with the occasional visual
play utilizing letter size and movement thrown in for good measure).

Good guys do not bomb your buzz with an
encyclopedic knowledge of ordnances. Good guys are peace buffs. They say Little Girls for Mayor. Sift pink dust
into the Sistine stove. Good guys see eye to eye with man-haters, who hate
guys. Man-haters are good guys: they may flip bad guys the bird but they do not
shoot them in the face for going to school; they are too busy helping women
through PTSD in their under-funded offices. If you knew what they knew you’d be
a man-hater along with the good guys. If abuse always produced abuse, we’d fear
the fang-glitter of little girls. I remind the man-hater I love that there are
good guys. (“GOOD GUYS”)

On
the surface, Throaty Wipes might
appear a gathering of assorted poems linked, if at all, only through a
curiosity about and engagement with poetic form (the final poem in the
collection, for example, is “WHAT POETRY ISN’T”), and what and how a poem
communicates, constructed as a unit as a quilt or collage. While there might be
elements of that in Throaty Wipes,
any gathering of pieces by the same author over the same stretch of time can’t
help but repeat echoes of concerns and considerations. In a 2014 interview posted at Touch the Donkey, Holbrook
wrote that “all my poems share some persistent concerns—when writing I think
about how we shape and are shaped by language, about how to invite people in to
a more intimate relationship with words, how cultural critique can be animated
by defamiliarization’s prodding to sensation/awareness.” Through exploring such
possibilities, her poems evoke a music akin to the twirls and glottals of Paul Celan, such
as the gymnastic features that open “EVEN THE IMPERTURBABLE SPOCK / TREMBLES ON
THE EDGE OF A / PLEASED REACTION.”: “In the awkward / silence of outer space, /
crickets chirr / on the Enterprise / bridge, whose ambient / sounds of a late
March / wetland celebrate / you, Spock, glossiest / blackbird, entering through
the / swish basket”